


i turn around and everything has changed

by eynn



Series: i can't go back and lose it all [28]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, Post-Order 66, and a lot of things stop making sense, and everyone gets even madder if possible at the kaminoans, i pick canon apart and repair only the bits i want to, in which a new function of the control chips is happily exploited by the clones, sith!jedi order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25686046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: “I think we weren’t . . . not younger than the Alphas. At first we were older. Then we were younger? Because of the stasis. They said that at least we weren’t failures like the Nulls. They could salvage us at least from the first batches. They said that the Alphas were us but better. More refined. So we had to learn from them how to be useful. We were the first ARCs. Then they put more in, because we were getting too close again. Sometimes they wanted us together so we wouldn’t affect the younger brothers, but they we’d get too close and remember and they’d pull us apart again. They . . .” Gree trails off. “They said that if they couldn’t burn the individuality out of us, they’d at least make it look intentional.”Barriss turns wide, scared eyes to Luminara.Everything they know about the vod’e is apparently wrong.
Relationships: CC-1004 | Gree/Luminara Unduli, Feral (Star Wars)/Barriss Offee
Series: i can't go back and lose it all [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658362
Comments: 34
Kudos: 550





	i turn around and everything has changed

The way back up to the city is longer than the way down from it. At least, that’s how it feels.

It became clear very quickly that although this vod’e-who-was-not had been ready to fight them as soon as he was conscious, he was in no shape to even really be walking. Feral takes most of his weight, half-carrying him, and Barriss has the rest. The man is shorter than the vod’e, ironically, and his head droops as they move slowly up the winding white corridor to the narrow stairs that will bring them back.

“The height thing must be something they changed,” he says quietly over Jango’s head. “I wish we could find out how they manipulated their genes. Anything would help at this point.”

Barriss blinks and then looks surprised. “Oh, I hadn’t even noticed. That’s – I wonder why they changed it?”

“Who changed?” Jango says. His voice is rough from disuse and damage and Feral internally winces. He knows he could do a better job of fixing it if he had more time.

“Your clones are all taller than you,” he explains. “The Kaminoans must have done it.”

“How do you know?”

“Who else could have?” Barriss answers. “Nobody even knew about this planet until Obi-Wan found out somehow and just a couple days later they were deployed. I mean, you do remember meeting him, right?”

“Who?”

“Obi-Wan. Master Kenobi. Um. He said you . . . fought? But at first you had a conversation and then later he followed you to Geonosis?”

Jango has made an effort to tilt his head, letting it rest against Feral’s shoulder, and he is staring at her. Feral can’t see his face, but his breathing feels like he is alarmed. He readjusts his grip around the man’s waist and arm to give him better support.

“I – _Master_ Kenobi? A jetii master?”

Barriss flinches, but so subtly that even Feral can hardly tell. “Yeah, he is. Was. I mean, there isn’t really any jetii anymore, but . . . Uh. I don’t really know how to explain it, things got political and . . . But he met you, here, and you fought each other and then you left and he followed you. And that’s how the war started.”

“War?”

“Oh, yeah, you were – Well, anyway, after the first battle on Geonosis, some of the planets in the Republic said they were leaving and became the Separatists, and they started attacking us, so the Senate put us in charge of the clone army and we kind of. Have been fighting ever since? Except for about a month ago we finally killed the Sith Lord that was playing both sides and now we’re kind of out of the Republic too.”

“There has been a civil war in the Republic, and your clones fought under the direction of the Senate,” Feral says softly as Jango just twitches in his grasp, heart beating wildly. He’s not sure how much he is actually understanding. “The jetii order fought alongside them. They have become family and disbanded the order as it has been known.”

“A-army,” Jango chokes. “How can. Not enough of them to be the army. Just a few. Five hundred at most, if we were desperate. They were –” He holds a hand out at about the level of his thigh. “Ad’ika. Small enough to carry.”

Feral starts walking again, slowly, helping Jango along. Barriss has a strange, tight look to her; it pulls at the tattoos across her nose and cheeks.

“How many of them were there?” she asks, and now her tone is soft, almost somber.

“Forty, but they, they killed at least three before I went down.”

“Do you remember their numbers?”

His head comes up for a moment. “I know their _names_ ,” he spits. “I won’t let them be known by number.”

Barriss gives Feral a slightly panicked glance.

“Can you tell me some of their names?” Feral asks, thinking that perhaps if there are any of the vod’e that Jango remembers, they can ask for their help.

Jango is even tenser than he has been for a moment, and then sighs. “Mirdala,” he whispers. “Genet. Shosenla. Gree. Tranyc. Appo. Kote. Edee. Ve’vut. Solus. Veshok. Boba. Mav. Shushai. Gi. Meshurok. Kad’la. Udesla.”

“Gree?” Barriss repeats. “I know a Gree. And I think that one of the commanders under Anakin is named Appo. I’m not sure about the rest, I’ve never heard those names before.”

Their eyes meet again and they quietly agree without words not to mention that Boba is . . . a unique case.

If it’s even the same Boba.

“Wait, one of your kids is named Fish?” Feral says without thinking.

To his surprise, Jango laughs. It’s soft and rusty, but he is smiling. “He won’t stay out of ocean. Nothing but to name him Gi and let him train for water.”

“That’s only eighteen,” Barriss says.

“There were supposed to have been twenty-five born first. Only eighteen were born alive. They were oldest, I knew them first. The other twenty-two were the second and third groups made. Survivors of them.” His head is drooping again, but they can see his mouth twist unhappily. “The cloners kept saying they were defective, born dead. So many of them.”

Barriss has a hand over her mouth and a sick expression in her eyes. Feral knows that she is thinking about the blue eyes in the lab and wondering how many were truly never alive and how many were ‘defective’ and taken for study without Jango knowing.

They know that Rex is among the oldest generation of vod’e, but if he was not taken and dissected for study, one of those original children must have been.

“I spent more time with oldest. The others were tiny, unable to talk or walk yet. They were the ones they were killing to make me stop. I raised the oldest myself. They were talking about recruiting trainers. They suggested growing adult bodies and having me imprint my mind onto those. They didn’t understand what I wanted.”

“What did you want?” Feral asks as they reach the steps and he tries his best to help the man without hurting him further.

“Not an army.”

~

Barriss calls for a medic as soon as they reach the door. Their comms would not work in the corridor; they had expected it to be shielded anyway.

Nyx and Kix are the ones who come to where they sit, backs to the wall by the door. Jango is propped up against Feral’s shoulder while Feral tries to ease the deep bruises around his throat. There are still vod’e wandering around wearing the uniforms they had been given for lack for more individual clothing, so it’s not obvious that he’s a stranger even if he has their face.

Kix puts down the stretcher and Nyx drops the medpack easily to the floor and they give them inquiring looks.

“This is the door,” Kix says suspiciously. “Now which one of you di’kuts is hurt?”

“It’s not us!” she says. “It’s empty down there.”

He gives her a frankly very intimidating look. “And which brother did you talk into going with you? We should all know better.” He raises his voice a little, clearly irritated.

“We found him in a stasis tank,” Feral says, giving Kix a rival glare. Barriss should not find it attractive, but something about the way his lip curls up into a snarl, showing his teeth, and his narrowed intense eyes and –

Yeah, she’s going to stop there. It’s not the time or the place.

Kix’s demeanor instantly changes. He drops to his knees, Nyx hovering behind him.

Jango lifts his head and stares blankly at them. “Why are you? So big?”

“I’m Kix, lead medic in the 501st. This is Nyx, lead medic from the 91st.” Kix says gently. “Do you remember your number?”

Jango’s eyes flash dangerously. “My _name_ is Jango.”

Barriss finds herself receiving two wide-eyed stares. She nods. “I think it is.”

“Okay,” Kix says, more to himself than anyone else. “Okay. What’s the last thing you remember, Jango?” There is only the faintest tremor in his voice on the name.

“Being half-choked by the cloners while they dragged me into that room.” His eyes go unfocused for a second. "They still had blood on their hands from the little ones,” he whispers. “My little ones.”

“I’ve healed the superficial abrasions, but there is a lot of deep bruising that needs to be treated and I also set the broken bones in his fingers and healed them as much as I could, but they should probably be bandaged just to be safe,” Feral says, snapping the medics back to attention.

Barriss doesn’t blame them.

They nod thoughtfully. “The infirmary in the Temple would be better,” Nyx says. “The one here isn’t for us.”

“What Temple?” Jango asks with deep suspicion.

The medics just stare at him in confusion. “The Temple,” Nyx repeats. “Our Temple.”

He still looks suspicious, but he lets them help him up and get him onto the stretcher. A lot of his willingness comes from the fact that as soon as he’s standing again, he passes out.

“I’m going to go find Gree,” Barriss tells them, and runs.

~

Luminara is in her rooms, actually having some time to just sit and rest with her wife (and that still sends chills up her spine and heat through her cheeks; the freedom to just _be_ with Gree, without having to have an excuse) when her former padawan runs in, tears dripping down her face, and immediately goes into the fresher.

Luminara and Gree exchange startled looks. They can hear her throwing up.

She sighs and goes to sit by Barriss, running touches as light as air across her head, more with the Force than with her hands, and holds the cloth of her headdress out of her way.

Gree pokes gently at her mind, and sends a hazy memory-picture of Feral with a question behind it.

“Did something happen between you and Feral?” she asks as Barriss stops spasming so violently and leans back into her arms. She’s reminded of the time when she was a tiny padawan and had gotten sick on a mission – she’d been too stubborn to admit her illness before it was totally obvious to anyone looking at her, and embarrassed to be seen looking for help, before Luminara had picked her up and carried her back to their rooms and spent the next four days force-feeding her tea and medicine.

Barriss had been much more honest about her capabilities after that.

“No,” she says. “We went exploring and we found – Master, there are labs down there with – with bits of people preserved in jars like exhibits. Babies. Anytime one of them was born different they’d take the first one and just pick them apart and I think it was just to understand why but they didn’t even realize they were alive or could feel pain or anything.”

Luminara sighs. “Did you go down to the wing we said we were going to get a team together for?”

“Every time we’re together Maul’s always lurking around the corner glaring at us!” Barriss snaps, sitting up a little straighter. Her face is still pale. “He wouldn’t just let us talk!”

She hands her a cloth to wipe her face and sighs again. “Barriss, that’s exactly why we said we were going to clear it out as a team. Because we knew there would be some awful things down there. If you want to take Feral on a date, please don’t do it by sneaking into dangerous areas.”

“We had our weapons,” she protests.

“Yes, but now you have seen things you didn’t want to. Not all dangers are physical.”

“Anyway, we found Jango down there in a stasis tank,” Barriss mumbles, scrubbing at her face. She slumps back against Luminara and her eyes fill with tears again. “He’s really hurt. Feral tried to fix him and we managed to get him up the stairs and now the medics have him but Master, he – he didn’t mean for all this to happen. All the vod’e were his, not just Boba. He named them, he raised them. They weren’t meant to be for the Republic at all. He told us the names of the ones that were old enough for him to start teaching and I don’t know them.” Her voice rises into almost a wail. “The only ones I recognized were Gree and Appo and Boba and they’re probably not even the ones he meant. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Luminara’s brain has stalled on ‘Jango’. She _saw_ the man die.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“He just wanted a clan,” Barriss snuffles. She is crying in earnest now. “I don’t know why he thought that cloning himself to make one was a good idea but he really just wanted a family and Sidious took it away and twisted it into an army and used it to kill so many people and dragged us all into it and they were killing them and they didn’t care. They didn’t even see them as people but he did and he remembers everything about them and –”

Luminara looks up to see Gree standing awkwardly in the doorway, eyes wide.

“How am I supposed to tell someone that the children he was raising are either dead or grown and they don’t remember him?”

“You found the prime?” Gree whispers.

“I . . . suppose?” Luminara answers. “I don’t understand. I was there, I literally saw him die.”

“He never really interacted with us. He said we were nothing. Just things that had been bought.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Barriss says, lifting her head from Luminara’s shoulder. “He remembers you, your name anyway. And Appo and Boba, Gi, Shushai. Uhh, Meshurok. Kote. Ve’vut. There were more but I don’t remember all the names.”

“I’ve never heard most of those –” Gree stops, frowns, shakes her head. “I think I know? I.” She rubs at the side of her head.

“Gree,” Luminara whispers. “Gree!”

“Yes?”

“That’s – why are you touching there? That’s where your chip is.” She can’t even describe the sinking dread that she feels every time Gree’s eyes go out of focus or she looks deep in thought. Seeing her touch the side of her head where the chip is makes her even more anxious.

“We were always told that there were some of us who were made first and made different,” she says, clearly thinking out loud. “A handful that were completely wild and followed one of the trainers. More than would only follow Prime’s orders. He might be remembering those?”

“No, you don’t understand,” Barriss says. “You weren’t just – just bodies to him. You were his.”

Gree laughs, bitter and harsh.

“What happened to the Alphas and the Nulls?” Luminara asks.

Gree shrugs. “Who knows. Most of the Alphas were always here, so they must have run away. The Nulls only followed Skirata and they left years ago. We didn’t miss them.” She grimaces. “The last orders Prime left the Alphas with was to kill us all if Kamino was invaded. And they didn’t even stop to think before they tried to do it. That . . . didn’t make us like them any more than we had.”

“That was not Jango,” Barriss insists. “Whoever they were taking orders from, that wasn’t the same person we found down there.”

“We were trained by some of the Alphas,” Gree continues. “They were harsh but that was only what we expected. They –” she frowns. “They had stasis tanks too.”

“Do you think that whoever Barriss and Feral found is an Alpha who’s had his memories messed with?” Luminara asks.

Gree rubs at her chip again. “No, I . . . stasis tanks,” she mumbles, looking at her hands as though she’s never seen them. “I . . . remember? Being in one, and waking up. The room was small, it was cold. Do you remember?” Her voice is dreamy, and she has the look that the vod’e get when they are talking to each other in their heads. “Veshok was named because he was obsessed with trees. Tranyc’s hair was green for days because of the freezing gel. He was the only one it showed on and Veshok cried because he wanted to be tree-colored. Edee and Kote bit the trainers and some of them got infections, all down their arms. Buir would take us down to the sea where he made a safe area with nets and teach us to swim and that’s when Gi got your name. Mirdala and Shushai made a plan and we tried to escape but they caught us. We . . . I . . . remember. White and red. The next thing, we were in class.” Gree leans on the wall, still pushing a hand against her head.

“Those are some of the other names he said,” Barriss whispers.

Luminara doesn’t know if her crying daughter or dazed wife should be her priority.

“Still together. Like they couldn’t keep us apart. Their eyes were wrong and they didn’t answer when I called their names. Or sometimes my eyes were wrong and I didn’t answer, because I’d forgotten. The Alphas were bigger. Then they took me into a room and made me forget again. And we – I forgot until now . . . He used to read to us every night. Teach us the names of stars and the resol’nare. How to find our way home.”

Her crying daughter who has inadvertently discovered something that might affect them even more than finding Sidious, or her wife who is apparently speaking as the voice of some traumatized hive mind.

“I think we weren’t . . . not younger than the Alphas. At first we were older. Then we were younger? Because of the stasis. They said that at least we weren’t failures like the Nulls. They could salvage us at least from the first batches. They said that the Alphas were us but better. More refined. So we had to learn from them how to be useful. We were the first ARCs. Then they put more in, because we were getting too close again. Sometimes they wanted us together so we wouldn’t affect the younger brothers, but they we’d get too close and remember and they’d pull us apart again. They . . .” Gree trails off. “They said that if they couldn’t burn the individuality out of us, they’d at least make it look intentional.”

Barriss turns wide, scared eyes to Luminara.

Everything they know about the vod’e is apparently wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> i am back to pull canon apart and stick it back together the way i like it to give everyone a more messed up backstory! yay


End file.
